Deterrence Resurrected:

Revisiting Some Fundamentals

COLIN S. GRAY

From Parameters, Summer 1991, pp. 13-21.

Of recent years several cottage industries of deterrence
studies have resumed active life following a hiatus of several decades.
Specifically, academics have endeavored to reduce deterrence to a sub-specialty
within political science; defense analysts have been seeking quasi-scientific
truth about "stable deterrence;" strategic and moral philosophers have
been going "back to basics;" and the defense community writ large has been
wondering whether its long-standing deterrence creed was not really overly
Soviet-looking in orientation and evidential base, and certainly unduly
nuclear in inspiration, application, and assumed context.

The Cold War may be over, but the United States still has a strategic
relationship with a very heavily nuclear-armed Soviet superpower. The political
future of the USSR is unknown, indeed is unknowable, but the historical
and cultural material from which that future will be fashioned does not
provide much fuel for optimistic speculation. All things are possible,
but the apparent reversion of recent months to authoritarian rule and the
collapse of anything seriously resembling perestroika probably should
not be read as only a temporary setback. The Soviet Union currently coercing
the Baltic republics, evading some of the key terms and purposes of the
CFE (Conventional Forces in Europe) treaty, and modernizing its strategic
nuclear forces comprehensively is indeed the real Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev, on the evidence to date, is not committed to the
political, economic, and social reform of the USSR as an end in and of
itself. Instead, he is committed first to the preservation of his personal
power, and second to the protection of the core values of the Soviet patrimony
which he inherited. Whatever Gorbachev released, or has appeared to release,
occurred as a result of the miscalculation that the devolution of power
would be slow and only partial (in east-central Europe and the peripheral
republics at home). The Soviet Union, either with Gorbachev as the reforming-then-repressive
czar or with Gorbachev's replacement, assuredly will continue to pose a
superpower level of strategic competition for the United States. Soviet
American relations in the future may be less antagonistic than was the
case for many of the years from 1946 until Gorbachev's accession to power
in 1986; nonetheless, the United States has a prospectively permanent need
of policy, strategy, and military posture to help manage the security relationship
with a Soviet/Great Russian superstate.

What follows is a series of propositions on deterrence, along with critical
commentaries. Their purposes are to help people to think appropriately
about deterrence and to distinguish strong from weak arguments.

Propositions on Deterrence

. The requirements of deterrence are indeterminate
or, at best, very uncertain.

Judgment is possible and necessary, but not quantified judgment. Not
only is it difficult if not impossible to calculate in a quantified
way what will or should deter, but even the intended deterrees will not
know how much of a politically and technically credible threat it would
take to deter them. Deterrence, or perhaps deterrent effectiveness, is
not a quality that can be purchased discretely and reliably by incremental
amounts. This reality tends to be obscured by the fallacy of making reference
to the deterrent, as if a force posture itself deters. The US strategic
nuclear triad is the agent of a deterrence policy, but candidate deterrees
have to choose to be deterred. In a deterrence relationship, intended deterrees
can always decide that they are not deterred, a situation which contrasts
sharply with a relationship of physical coercion wherein the enemy's behavior
is controlled directly by our forces.

An intended deterrent may not deter if the intended deterree believes
we will not fight, or will not fight very hard (regardless of the size
of our forces); if he is confident (however foolish such a belief) of securing
military victory; if he believes (incorrectly) that war is absolutely inevitable
anyway; or if he is totally or substantially indifferent either to threats
in general or to the particular threats he receives from us.

Even if our deterrent policy is nominally effective, we may trip accidentally
or inadvertently into war, perhaps courtesy of the catalytic action of
a third party. Further, individual leaders and leadership groups can be
subject to mood swings---optimism/ pessimism--and also are liable to redefine
policy objectives (the "stakes") quite abruptly. In short, an adequate
deterrent at 0900 hours may not be adequate by 1600 hours.

In sum, an adequate deterrent, let alone an enduring condition of stable
deterrence, cannot be calculated with precision. Deterrence is a realm
of educated guesswork. Scholars talk of the "calculus of deterrence"[1]
and of "risk/benefit analysis," but those are just overblown figures of
speech.

. To deter, an ounce of will is worth a pound
of muscle.

This proposition conveys an important truth. It does not, however, provide
an adequate basis for development of an attractive theory or policy of
deterrence. There are at least three outstanding problems.

First, military muscle can be acquired and sustained much more reliably
than can political will. Will may indeed be to muscle as 16 is to one,
but defense planners cannot know that their political leaders, or their
country more generally, truly would generate and demonstrate the
necessary will when and for as long as it would be needed. Thus, in the
early 1990s the United States can plan and invest in a reasonably well
balanced strategic-forces triad for the beginning of the next century--START
or no START. But, if one takes the will-to-muscle proposition as a candidate
guide to defense planning, what would be its implications? What kind and
quantity of strategic force posture generates perceptions abroad of the
requisite "will" if the force posture is divorced from serious military
designs for campaign plans?

Second, it is not sufficient to have what we think ought to be a deterring
level of political will. That will needs to be perceived for what it is
by the intended deterrees. The stuff of which wars are made includes a
determination to fight which is underappreciated abroad. It would be difficult
to improve upon Herman Kahn's observation that "if we want to have our
strategic forces contribute to the deterrence of provocation, it must be
credible.... Usually the most convincing way to look willing is to be willing."[2]

Third, even a credible determination to fight might avail little if
the quantity and quality of combat power threatened falls short of some
critical threshold of effect as seen by the intended deterrees. In 1939
the Poles had no credibility problem as to their will to resist Germany.
Their problem, rather, was a shortage of modern military muscle. Will may
be more important than muscle for deterrence, but it is not as reliable--so,
acquire the latter and hope for the former.

. The art of commitment is critically important
for deterrence.

Commitment, a close but distinguishable relative of will, may be a policy
art; but its utility is jeopardized to the extent that the depth of the
commitment exceeds the depth of national interests at stake. The implications
of this proposition were explored near exhaustively by Thomas C. Schelling
in the mid 1960s.[3] A commonsense validity pervades the idea. Deterrent
effect will be secured only if a would-be aggressor believes, or suspects,
that (for example) US policy is truly committed to the protection of the
regional values at issue.

Some American strategic studies of the late 1950s and early 1960s chose
to treat commitment as a flexible quality which lent itself to more or
less agile manipulation by suitably schooled, tough-minded policymakers.
Without denying the important facts that foreign perceptions of US national
commitment will be a variable and that those perceptions can be influenced
by US behavior and other signals, important constraints also obtain.

First, the subject of political commitment, and foreign perception of
the same, is not a level playing field on which American policymakers can
weave whatever game plans they wish and hope to succeed. For an actual
case in point, US policy toward Vietnam was motivated partially by a determination
to be seen as a reliable protecting power. The problem was that there was
an inherent softness at the center of US policy. The political integrity
of South Vietnam did not have the intrinsic or exemplary value to the United
States which US policy, incredibly, insisted on declaring. In other words,
it is one thing to treat commitment as an art in support of desperately
vital national interests; it is quite another to treat commitment as a
social-scientific tool for use by skillful policymakers. The latter will
tend not to work (for long). If the scale of asserted commitment fails
to bear some plausible proportionality to the worth of values at stake,
intolerable criticism on the home front should be expected.

Second, crisis-time posturing as well as actual conflict entails the
clash of opposing wills, of contending commitments. The question is never
just, "Are we committed credibly?" In addition one must ask whether, and
if so to what degree, the would-be aggressors are committed (and whether
they have a feasible exit route).

. A warfighting deterrent is more user-friendly
for policymakers than is a punitive deterrent.

All would-be deterrents are warfighting in character--to punish the
enemy is a way of fighting a war. If classical-style military victory is
unobtainable, then US warfighting strategy actually is punitive in nature.
The history of US targeting policy since 1961 attests to policymakers'
agreement with this proposition.[4] It is important to recognize, however,
that many of the distinctions drawn between deterrence and defense or,
rephrased, between a punitive and a warfighting deterrent, lack for real
substance.

For several reasons of potential self-deterrence as well as other deterrence,
the United States has never settled for a strategic-forces posture which
could only punish Soviet (inter alia) urban areas. Nonetheless, the influence
of assured-destruction thinking on plans and posture should not be dismissed
as entirely trivial, while the salience of a warfighting vision easily
can be overstated.

A classical warfighting approach to nuclear strategy would seek to devise
a US military force capable of winning a nuclear war.[5] That is
not, and long has not been, the character of US nuclear strategy. Indeed,
on close inspection it transpires that the alleged warfighting trend in
US targeting policy from the early 1970s to the present actually has been
a variant of a punitive approach to the subject. With differing emphases,
the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and now Bush administrations have endorsed
nuclear targeting ideas which have as their leitmotiv the punishment of
the highest values of the Soviet state--values which happen to include
military assets.[6] However, the operational purpose of such a warfighting
approach would not be to win a war in a classical sense, but rather to
punish the Soviet polity in ways which that polity should find intolerable
in prospect--hence a stable deterrence should be the happy result. A true
warfighting strategic force posture would be designed to seek to defeat
the enemy's strategic forces and limit damage to North America by physically
denying him the ability to do our society harm.

Just as the US warfighting approach to nuclear deterrence and actual
combat is not really of the character suggested by the "warfighting" label,
so its nominal contrary--a punitive deterrent--is much less contrary than
its label might suggest. There is no such beast as a non-warfighting nuclear
deterrent. All targeting designs express, or imply, a theory of and policy
for the actual conduct of war. City bombardment or counter-military strikes
are both examples of warfighting.

. A nuclear deterrent is graded abroad.

For policy to be effective as a deterrent, US military power
has to speak persuasively to the values of foreigners as well as to the
values and judgments of Americans. Nonetheless, all defense policy is made
at home, somewhere, hence its first test of adequacy has to be domestic.
Over the course of a long peace, however, it has not been unknown for defense
planners and their political masters to forget that the needs of "real
deterrence" can differ from those of "deterrence on paper" (to adapt Carl
von Clausewitz's distinction between "real war" and "war on paper").[7]

In peacetime, foes tend to become abstract Red Teams and frequently
are assumed to think and behave in ways which exercise our plans and forces,
rather than truly test them. Projection, as psychologists warn us, can
be a problem. In the absence of genuine knowledge about, for example, the
probable Soviet modus operandi for a central nuclear war, American theorists
(and planners) are wont to discern, or invent, a conveniently accommodating
enemy.

The error of projecting contemporary Western ideas upon other strategic
cultures is not by any means confined to nuclear planners guessing about
the Soviet Union. A leading American strategic theorist, Edward N. Luttwak,
for example, has quite brilliantly imputed to the Roman Empire what almost
certainly is a wholly fictitious grand strategy.[8]

To be conducted successfully, a US national security policy has to play
to American strengths and be domestically tolerable. But to be successful,
that national security policy also must generate the strategic effectiveness
necessary to prevail abroad in the teeth of an opposing national security
policy. In the special case of deterrence, when US policymakers are seeking
to persuade foreign political leaders not to do something, that persuasion
has to work within the mental universe and political-organizational context
and routines of those foreign political leaders. Value systems can differ
markedly from political culture to culture, and certainly among different
historical periods. Many of the people whom US leaders may need to deter
(or actually compel to disgorge illicit gains) in the years ahead do not
share American, or Judaeo-Christian values. They may be sensitive to loss
of face or honor or dignity or possibly financial loss, but they may be
less than impressed with the cries of widows and orphans.

. The officially perceived need for deterrent
effect is fickle, fluctuating between near zero and an insistence upon
heroic performance.

Armed forces need to be sized and shaped for international security
storms, not for fair weather or conditions of permanent peace. It is understandable
for defense communities not to plan against truly worst cases, for example
a Soviet Union so desperate as to be literally beyond deterrence. Nonetheless,
it is instructive to recall that close-to-worst cases do occur. For example,
British military planners recognized in the early 1930s that their most
awful nightmare would be simultaneous hostilities with a great power in
north-central Europe, a great power in the Mediterranean, and a great power
in the Far East. Germany, Italy, and Japan, respectively, saw to it that
the British nightmare came true, albeit alleviated by the eventual facts
of Russian and American alliance.

The first proposition on deterrence discussed in this article argued
the uncertainty of how much is enough to deter at any particular time.
The present proposition warns that a US polity which could not and did
not foresee the demise of the Cold War in the late 1980s, and which (generally--as
always, there were some honorable exceptions) was less than far-sighted
concerning 1990s-era perils in the Persian Gulf, should not trust itself
to comforting assumptions about the likely need for nuclear-force deterrent
support over the next decade and more.

An individual may look at a bright blue sky, decide strangely that it
will never rain again, and proceed to discard all his rainwear. When he
is proved wrong he can hasten to a shop and instantly replenish his stock
of bad weather equipment. But if the United States should judge the currently
sunny climate of superpower relations to be a permanent and irreversible
condition, and accordingly decide to discard much of its current and virtually
all of its future strategic nuclear forces with or without benefit of START,
it may find there is no shop to repair that deficiency in the event of
a nasty turn in the weather. Unfortunately, US policy is not the problem,
contrary to the views of some arms control ideologists and others who have
seen the enemy and decided he is us. Instead, the problem is that US defense
planners today have no way of knowing what Soviet policy will be five to
ten years hence, nor what burdens, as a consequence, US policymakers then
will wish to place upon what remains of US nuclear forces.

Nuclear deterrence is an unprovable phenomenon whose inferable success
works, paradoxically, through political channels to undermine the plausibility
of the need for its continuance. After all, what can one show to
skeptics as the demonstrable security benefits of a policy of deterrence?
Events which did not happen? But how can one be sure it was nuclear deterrence
that caused those events not to happen?

Philosophical questions such as those above cannot prudently be dismissed
as simply academic. For their own safety, many people need to be persuaded
that the American policy demand for strategic effectiveness of the long-range
nuclear forces could vary during this new decade from near zero to the
heroic. Moreover, there is no way of knowing, of really knowing, just how
much dissuasive or compellent effect might be asked of those forces. Marshal
of the Soviet Union Nicolai Ogarkov has been telling veterans groups in
the USSR that "order must be brought to the country."[9] An illiberal restoration
of central discipline is the most likely among the possible futures for
what, today, remains an exceedingly heavily nuclear-armed USSR.

The requirement for deterrent effect has an unhappy tendency to fluctuate
massively between the pole of near irrelevance and the pole of maximum
need. As with the case of strategic air and sea lift, the United States
finds that it needs either very little or the maximum that the defense
community can muster in a hurry. Legislators and "reasonable" defense officials
are wont to gravitate in a time of long peace toward the "golden mean"
of providing for a modest, compromise level of military capability. Such
a level is plainly excessive for the needs of peace, yet would fall embarrassingly
if not fatally short of requirements should (or rather when) the trumpet
sounds.

. General deterrence and immediate deterrence
are not synonymous.[10]

The effect of deterrence is specific to time, place, issue, and adversary.
US military power in support of a general framework of order requires the
flexibility to be applied so as to achieve specific, immediate, regional
effects. The deterrent effect generated by strategic nuclear forces often,
if inadvertently, is treated somewhat in the abstract (and in ways analogous
to the effects of airpower, seapower, landpower, and spacepower). In practice,
however, deterrence is always specific and has reference to concrete stakes.
It is probably correct to argue that Soviet-American competition, particularly
in the military realm, has a broad mutual deterrent effect. This effect
is typically expressed in terms of perceptions of a general "correlation
of forces" or "balance of power" helping to shape detailed policy choices.
But superpower competition manifests itself in particular ways, in particular
places, and over particular issues. The balance of relative advantage in
general deterrence is not reliably translatable into immediate deterrence.
Somehow, broad structures, frameworks, and concepts have to provide usable
coin of the realm in crises that have some local focus (if more general
meaning).

For instance, in 1956 it was unarguable that there was only one first-class
superpower, the United States. However, that US superpower judged that
it lacked the immediate deterrent clout to sustain the free Hungary
of Imre Nagy, while it certainly declined to consider nuclear coercion
as a policy course to oblige the Soviets to withdraw from Hungary a second
time.

For a further example, the US armed forces today are in the very early
stages of being reconfigured, or reconsidered, as a post-Cold War mainstay
for global and regional order. It is predictable with high confidence that
the United States will produce general deterrence in seemingly massive
quantities. However, deterrence is never really general; rather,
is it always specific. The general deterrence which the United States should
provide may or may not function locally at the immediate level. In 1990,
Iraq was not deterred from invading Kuwait (for the third time). In the
future, can India, or Pakistan, be deterred from military adventure?

Such considerations are not to suggest that military power in both absolute
and relative senses is unimportant. But it is to suggest that to be effective
when and where it is needed--which frequently will not be predictable long
in advance--US military power has to be flexibly focusable for immediate
deterrence. Immediate deterrence in the Gulf, or in Kashmir, or in Translyvania,
is not an elementary, existential consequence of a general deterrence.

Deterrence for the 1990s

Questions of deterrence theory and nuclear strategy are currently attracting
again a degree of attention that many people will find surprising. Four
reasons combine to explain this revival.

First, the apparent imminence of a START treaty, and early discussion
of a START II follow-on, has stirred the defense community to pose unusually
basic questions about the merit in, say, phased strategic-force reductions
down to a real level of 3000 weapons. Second, the transformation of Soviet-American
relations from a Cold War character to something else as yet unformed is
promoting a healthy questioning of the strategic utility of strategic-nuclear
capabilities of different kinds. Third, US-Iraqi relations in 1990-91 demonstrated
first a massive failure by the United States to recognize when deterrence
was required, and second a subsequent but no less massive failure to compel
by coercive threat an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. It has begun to dawn
on many American officials and theorists that the understanding of deterrence
gleaned largely from four decades of experience with the USSR might not
apply to regional conflicts without some substantial amendment. Finally,
Iraq's demonstration that the missile age truly has arrived has encouraged
American policymakers and theorists to revisit their beliefs on the subject
of the offense-defense relationship. It looks very much as if President
Bush's new world disorder will require some active missile defense.

8. Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From
the First Century A.D. to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1976). The most punishing criticism of Luttwak's thesis to date
is in Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East
(Oxford. Ecg: Clarendon Press, 1990).

Dr. Colin S. Gray is Chairman of the National Institute for Public
Policy in Fairfax, Virginia. Dr. Gray formerly was Director of National
Security Studies at the Hudson Institute and, prior to that, an Assistant
Director at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He received
his D. Phil. degree in international politics from Oxford University in
1970. Dr. Gray's most recent book is War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy
and Statecraft for the Next Century (Simon and Schuster, 1990). Currently
he is completing a book on Seapower and Landpower in War: An Exploration
in Strategy.